Thanks to the persistence and savings of one San Francisco man, there is a now a space in the Mission District where pasta extruders can rub shoulders with chocolate temperers and where liquid-nitrogen ice cream makers can mix with brisket smokers — all of them using the technical equipment that home cooks can’t fit into the walk-in closets of their apartments.

After years of construction, a former Mozilla programmer named Dan Mills is opening Tinker Kitchen to the public Friday. It may well be the first culinary maker space in the United States.

Currently open to its first crop of members, Tinker Kitchen operates akin to hacker spaces or maker spaces such as Noisebridge in San Francisco. Instead of woodworking tools and 3-D printing equipment, the 1,700-square-foot kitchen is stocked with a PacoJet (for making ultra-smooth sorbets), a coffee roaster, a wet grinder and temperer for making chocolate, as well as the standard six-burner stove and stack of convection ovens.

Other, more esoteric equipment on hand: a pasta extruder, a flour mill, a wok burner, a Combi oven, a centrifuge, several devices for making ice cream. When The Chronicle asked Mills if Tinker Kitchen had an Instant Pot, he said no — and then immediately placed an order.

A devoted experimenter in the kitchen, the founder has been trying to accumulate all this equipment in one space for three years now. He envisions Tinker Kitchen as a community space for ambitious amateurs, as well as professional cooks who want to prototype new dishes or prepared foods. Despite the fact that the health department has inspected the kitchen, it is not zoned as a commercial kitchen, so professionals cannot sell what they make there.

Tinker Kitchen is currently selling monthly memberships with drop-in access to the space for $150, as well as one-day passes for $35 a person. There are also plans to offer cooking classes and rent out the space for events. Members can drop in when they want, though they are expected to clean up after themselves. The equipment is first-come, first-served, and the capacity of the space is 45 people.

Tinker Kitchen quietly opened two weeks ago for contributors who purchased a one-month membership through a Kickstarter campaign, which raised a total of $35,000.

“I wasn’t sure if people were going to try to use the same equipment, but it’s a self-selecting audience, so people seem to enjoy having the playground to use different things,” Mills said.

After a few opening celebrations, it will open to drop-in members starting later this week.

Some of the first members are professionals, Mills says.

“But the majority are hobbyists who just love the idea of experimenting with equipment they don’t otherwise have access to,” he said.

Jonathan Kauffman has been writing about food for The Chronicle since the spring of 2014. He focuses on the intersection of food and culture — whether that be profiling chefs, tracking new trends in nonwestern cuisines, or examining the impact of technology on the way we eat.

After cooking for a number of years in Minnesota and San Francisco, Kauffman left the kitchen to become a journalist. He reviewed restaurants for 11 years in the Bay Area and Seattle (East Bay Express, Seattle Weekly, SF Weekly) before abandoning criticism in order to tell the stories behind the food. His first book, “Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat,” was published in 2018.